Message of the day

The other day someone mentioned the need for taking more advantage of the UNIX features in the desktop. Specifically, message of the day, talk/wall/finger were mentioned, in a need to take advantage of the multi user features we have. So, since I agree with what was said, I went through the addition of showing the message of the day (/etc/motd) at the beginning of the GNOME session.

Since it adds new strings and features, this can’t be added for 2.12, so I’m posting it here to get some comments (like if all distros use /etc/motd) and hopefully post it for inclusion after 2.12 is branched. The patch is here.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 18th, 2005 at 7:23 am and is filed under GNOME, Linux. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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Rodrigo, wouldn’t it be better to have the MOTD displayed in the splash screen so you can see something amusing / useful while Gnome is starting and it doesn’t get into your way later on. The current implementation requires pressing ok to get rid of the message dialog and I think I’d end up disabling this functionality.

Of course, a problem is that now /etc/motd usually has some generic distro information instead of useful info the end-users. But if desktop environments start displaying it, maybe it will become used again.

I much prefer the idea of integrating this into GDM rather than a dialog a user has t oactually click. To be honest, I’d find the MOTD pretty annoying – the first thing I do in any Windows app with a similar idea is switch the damn things off!

I would, however, be interested in seeing today’s fortune on my GDM screen…!

I can see how network administrators would love this feature. Imagine a office where all users get notified about, say, that there are some problems with the fileserver at the moment and that the administrator is working hard on fixing it, or similar stuff.

That’s a brilliant idea – but that sort of messaging should surely be handled by a dameon and libnotify?

Netsend under nt displays an ok messagebox which can be very annoying. We use an in house solution to that sort of messaging for our xp machines that sits idling in the background and pops up pertinent information as and when it arrives in an xp info bubble. Perhaps an idea for a Gnome Love type project?

# If InfoMsgFile points to a file, the greeter will display the contents of the# file in a modal dialog box before the user is allowed to log in.#InfoMsgFile=# If InfoMsgFile is present then InfoMsgFont can be used to specify the font# to be used when displaying the contents of the file.#InfoMsgFont=Sans 24

Jon – I was thinking about the same thing a few weeks ago. It would definitely be helpful to sysadmins to have something like this (for example with the ability to show messages from a queue at login, or push notifications to logged in users). In a multiuser LTSP environment like the one I run at work, it would be great. I’ve thought about just having our users get auto-logged in to our Jabber server when they sign on, and doing it that way, but I haven’t really played with it yet.

“Idea: display /etc/motd only if its SHA1 hash changed since the last time it was shown.”

Sounds very nice to me. I agree you don’t need to see the same message again and again.

It’s also very important to be able to disable this feature.

My two cents are it would rock to have this implemented as a notification rather than an intrusive pop-up dialog that needs to be clicked.

If this dialogs makes it anyway I would be good to add a checkbox to “Show this message next time you login”.

Of course, you need to have some intuitive UI to turn it on again if you turned it off.

I also agree there should be a way (looks like a new program would do fine) to view the motd whenever the user wants, not just at session start-up. If this program existed, would it be nice to have so sort of historial to be able to review te messages of the past days? I’d say “yes”

The /etc/issue should be shown before you login, and /etc/motd afterwards. /etc/motd can contain information that shouldn’t be available to anyone just walking past a computer (eg “All passwords must be changed by friday” — A Blackhat walking past can find out that everyone’s passwords will be changed and use that as part of a social engineering attack).

At the university here they use a program like xmessage as part of the login scripts to show the MOTD. Perhaps showing the MOTD by default isn’t very useful (due to the crap distro’s put in it), but having it as an option to display “Never, Always, When-Modified” would be useful to people that administer larger networks. Alternatively just encouraging distros to not ship with inane motd’s, or provide an easy (And obvious) method for people to change the MOTD to something more useful.

The motd they showed in the labs did require the user to dismiss it every time they logged in, which while irritating, wasn’t a big deal. It did contain information such as who to call for help if you were having technical issues etc and the Unix standard “/home is nearly full, please remove any unnecessary files”.